Why do people do reprehensible things? What accounts for the sort of malice one reads
about in the news every day – not only homicides and extreme violence, but acts of
deviousness and treachery, unscrupulous business practices, rape and spousal battery?
Why do the alarm bells of conscience go off in some heads but not in others? Across
the last sixty years philosophers and psychotherapists have offered insights into
the subject. Here is a sampling of them.

Over the last quarter century the experiment in cyber life has gone off with little
to no resistance. No sooner did the technologies arrive than the entire world embraced
them. In the early days of the web, however, and in the years preceding it, there
were some who sounded an alarm. “It’s an unreal universe, a soluble tissue of nothingness,"
wrote one expert. "While the Internet beckons brightly, selectively flashing an icon
of knowledge-as-power, this non-place lures us to surrender our time on earth. A
poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where
– in the holy names of Education and Progress – important aspects of human interactions
are relentlessly devalued."

Do people really hunger for freedom, as so many thinkers over the ages have asserted?
Or does freedom terrify them – is it something they would rather renounce? “The common
man,” Van Wyck Brooks once observed, “has no sense of having surrendered his will:
he regards it as a mere pretension of the philosophers that man has a will to surrender.
He eats, drinks and continues to be merry or morose regardless of his moral destiny:
to possess no principle of growth, no spiritual backbone is, indeed, his greatest
advantage in a world where success is the reward of accommodation."

The Beautiful and the True in art do not exist; what interests me is the intensity
of a personality transposed directly, clearly into the work; the man and his vitality;
the angle from which he regards the elements and in what manner he knows how to gather
sensation, emotion, into a lacework of words and sentiments.

– Tristan Tzara, Lecture on Dada

Among the means for the regeneration of mankind, those made with noise and show are
of the least importance.

– From The Wisdom of Confucius, ed. by Lin Yutang

The true apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It
isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning
of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with
the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable
about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.
It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Criticism of tendencies in modern society is automatically countered, before it is
fully uttered, by the argument that things have always been like this…Assent is given
to what has been drummed into people's heads by philosophy of every hue: that whatever
has the persistent momentum of existence on its side is thereby proved right. One
need only be discontented to be at once suspect as a world reformer.

– Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little
his despair over his fate...but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees
among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all,
he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.

– Franz Kafka, Diaries

One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of
the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years.

Contrary to what is often supposed, depression may not be some “disease” that needs
to be extirpated from the mind; it might instead be a natural reaction to one's social
surroundings and situation – the healthy suspicion that the life people have actually
created, the “structure of society,” is not one worth participating in.

"The 'I-It' relationship is characterized by the fact that it is not a genuine relationship
because it does not take place between the I and the It. When another person is an
It to me, I am, first of all, perfectly alone. I gaze at him and view him from every
possible direction, I observe his place in the scheme of things, and I find elements
that distinguish him from them. All of this…takes place within me; I am judging and
I am observing, and the external world is relevant only to the extent that it enters
my being."

“We do not meet one another as persons in the several aspects of our total life,
but know one another only fractionally, as the man who fixes the car, or as that
girl who serves our lunch, or as the woman who takes care of our child at school,”
C. Wright Mills once observed. “Pre-judgement and prejudice flourish when people
meet people only in this segmental manner. The humanistic reality of others does
not, cannot, come through.”

“A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of
her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child,
subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil,
with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother.”

Cratylus was a disciple of Heraclitus’ and a contemporary of Plato’s (one of Plato’s
dialogues was named after him, in fact). It was Heraclitus who said memorably that
“one cannot step into the same river twice.” Cratylus altered the epigram to read,
“One cannot step into the same river even once.” As he saw it, the ceaseless flux
of life precluded knowledge and understanding, which must rest on far stabler foundations.

The following concise summary of his position can be found in the Harper Collins
Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Peter Angeles (New York, 1992), p. 277.

[According to Cratylus], no knowledge can be had of reality; one cannot say anything
about anything. The communication of knowledge or of anything at all is impossible
because all things are in perpetual change. The language that is used to communicate
itself changes in the process of communication; the speaker is in a process of change;
the meanings and ideas change even as one is thinking and uttering them; the recipient
of the communication is in change; and the total environment is in continual change
without anything ever remaining the same. Cratylus concluded that one cannot say
anything about anything and that one should not try. He refused to talk, since talking
appeared to him senseless, meaningless, a waste of effort. He merely wiggled his
finger to indicate he was fleetingly responding to stimuli.

The camera sees but doesn’t think. Whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, the object
of its affection doesn’t matter; what matters is the surge and volume of emotion
that it engenders and evokes, the floods of consciousness drawn as willingly to a
blood bath in Afghanistan as to a bubble bath in Paris. As the habits of mind beholden
to the rule of images come to replace the structures of thought derived from the
meaning of words, the constant viewer eliminates the association of cause with effect,
learns that nothing necessarily follows from anything else…

Celebrity is about being, not becoming. Once possessed of the sovereign power to
find a buyer, all celebrity is royal. The images of wealth and power demand nothing
of their votaries other than the duty of ritual obeisance. The will to learn gives
way to a being in the know, which is the instant recognition of the thousands of
logos encountered in the course of a day’s shopping and an evening’s programming…Celebrities
of various magnitudes become the familiar spirits of insurance policies and shaving
creams, breathe the gift of life into tubes of deodorant, awaken with their personal
touch the spirit dormant in the color of a lipstick or a bottle of perfume. The wishful
thinking moves the merchandise, accounts not only for high-end appearance fees ($3
million to Mariah Carey to attend a party; $15,000 for five minutes in the presence
of Donald Trump) but also for the Wall Street market in nonexistent derivatives and
the weapons of mass destruction gone missing in Iraq…

Like the camera, the market moves but doesn’t think, drawn as willingly to the production
of nuclear warheads as to the growing of oranges or grapes. It doesn’t recognize
such a thing as a poor celebrity. Celebrity is money with a human face, the “pegs”
and “loops” on which to hang the dream of riches that is “the darling passion” of
the American breast. Bipartisan and nondenominational, the hero with a thousand faces
unfortunately doesn’t evolve into a human being. Let money become the seat of power
and the font of wisdom, and the story ends with an economy gone bankrupt, an army
that wins no wars, and a politics composed of brightly colored balloons.

The necessity for the name “God” lies in the fact that our being has depths which
naturalism, whether evolutionary, mechanistic, dialectical or humanistic, cannot
or will not recognize. And the nemesis which has overtaken naturalism in our day
has revealed the peril of trying to suppress them. As Tillich puts it,

Our period has decided for a secular world. That was a great and much-needed decision…It
gave consecration and holiness to our daily life and work. Yet it excluded those
deep things for which religion stands: the feeling for the inexhaustible mystery
of life, the grip of an ultimate meaning of existence, and the invincible power of
an unconditional devotion. These things cannot be excluded. If we try to expel them
in their divine images, they re-emerge in daemonic images. Now, in the old age of
our secular world, we have seen the most horrible manifestations of these daemonic
images; we have looked more deeply into the mystery of evil than most generations
before us; we have seen the unconditional devotion of millions to a satanic image;
we feel our period’s sickness unto death.

There are depths of revelation, intimations of eternity, judgements of the holy and
the sacred, awarenesses of the unconditional, the numinous and the ecstatic, which
cannot be explained in purely naturalistic categories without being reduced to something
else. There is the “Thus saith the Lord” heard by prophet, apostle and martyr for
which naturalism cannot account. But neither can it discount it merely by pointing
to the fact that “the Lord” is portrayed in the Bible in highly mythological terms,
as one who “inhabits eternity” or “walks in the garden in the cool of the evening.”
The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an
illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright blue sky, or anywhere else.
Belief in God is a matter of “what you take seriously without any reservation,” of
what for you is ultimate reality. [Emphasis in original.]

In Man And His Symbols (1964, pp.48-49), Carl Jung offers this observation about
the many people he had either known or counseled over the course of his life:

"I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals
who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their
minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent
and wide-awake people who lived (as far as one could make out) as if they had never
learned to use their sense organs: They did not see the things before their eyes,
hear the words sounding in their ears, or notice the things they touched or tasted.
Some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies.

"There are others who seemed to live in a most curious condition of consciousness,
as if the state they had arrived at today were final, with no possibility of change,
or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever. They seemed
devoid of all imagination, and they entirely and exclusively depended upon their
sense-perception. Chances and possibilities did not exist in their world, and in
'today' there was no real 'tomorrow'. The future was just the repetition of the past."

Apart from the signal instance of Stalinism, it's hard to think of a historical movement
which has more squalidly betrayed its own revolutionary origins [than Christianity].
Christianity long ago shifted from the side of the poor and dispossessed to that
of the rich and aggressive. The liberal establishment really has nothing whatsoever
to fear from it and everything to gain. For the most part, it's become the creed
of the suburban well-to-do, not the astonishing promise offered to the rifraff and
undercover anti-colonial militants with whom Jesus himself hung out. The suburbanite
response to the anawim, a term which can be roughly translated into American English
as 'loser,' is for the most part to flush them off the streets.

This brand of piety is horrified by the sight of the female breast, but considerably
less appalled by the obscene inequalities between rich and poor. It laments the death
of a fetus, but is apparently undisturbed by the burning to death of children in
Iraq or Afghanistan in the name of U.S. global dominion. By and large, it worships
a God fashioned blasphemously in its own image -- a clean-shaven, short-haired, gun-toting,
sexually obsessed God with a special regard for that ontologically privileged piece
of the globe just south of Canada and just north of Mexico, rather than the Yahweh
who is homeless, faceless, stateless, and imageless, who prods his people out of
their comfortable settlement into the tractless terrors of the desert, and who brusquely
informs them that their burnt offerings stink in his nostrils...Far from refusing
to conform to the powers of this world, Christianity has become the nauseating cant
of lying politicians, corrupt bankers, and fanatical neo-cons, as well as an immensely
profitable industry in its own right...

The Christian church has tortured and disemboweled in the name of Jesus, gagging
dissent and burning its critics alive. It has been oily, santimonious, brutally oppressive,
and vilely bigoted. Morality for this brand of belief is a matter of the bedroom
rather than the boardroom. It supports murderous dictatorships in the name of God,
views both criticism and pessimism as unpatriotic, and imagines that being a Christian
means maintaining a glazed grin, a substantial bank balance, and a mouthful of pious
platitudes. It denounces terrorism, but excludes from its strictures such kidnapping,
torturing, murdering outfits as the CIA...

This brand of faith fails to see that the only cure for terrorism is justice. It
also fails to grasp to what extent the hideous, disfigured thing clamoring at its
gates is its own monstrous creation. It is unable to acknowledge this thing of darkness
as in part its own, unable to find its own reflection in its distorted visage...It
is hard to avoid the feeling that a God as bright, resourceful, and imaginative as
the one that might just possibly exist could not have hit on some more agreeable
way of saving the world than religion.

I am talking, then, about the distinction between what seems to me a scriptural and
an ideological kind of Christian faith -- a distinction which can never simply be
assumed but must be interminably argued. One name for this thankless exercise is
what Nietzsche, who held that churches were the tombs and sepulchres of God, called
in Kierkegaardian phrase saving Christianity from Christendom. Any preaching of the
Gospel which fails to constitute a scandal and affront to the political state is
in my view effectively worthless. It is not a project which at present holds out
much promise of success.

The following is an excerpt from Marjorie Grene's essay "Martin Heidegger" in The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ms. Grene passed away in March 2009; she wrote some two
dozen books, among which are works on Sartre and Heidegger.

The "darkening of the world" is Heidegger's constant theme. So, for example, in Holzwege
("Woodpaths," 1950), he tells us that we live in the age of research, of the planned,
systematic coordination of intellectual tasks. And what sort of tasks can be planned
and coordinated? Neat, limited, manageable tasks -- tasks, primarily, that demand
inventiveness rather than understanding, tasks for engineering know-how rather than
theoretical insight. Heidegger draws no line between pure and applied science. Science
for him is research, and research is a procedure for solving well-packaged problems.
Such problems are, in general, those of manufacture, of inventing new and better
gadgets. According to Heidegger, das Herstellbare, the collection of gadgets, is
what we are after; that is what specialization, the rigid departmental structure
of expertise in our society, amounts to. And all this vast proliferation of technical
skills nevertheless has its inner unity -- that is, its historical and metaphysical
unity. It had to happen this way. It had to happen this way because we are fallen
out of Being. We are more concerned with beings, from genes to space ships, than
with our true calling, which is to be shepherds and watchers of Being. So it is that
we are lost, and Being itself has become a haze and an error -- nothing.